Alicia Ernestina de la Caridad del Cobre Martínez Hoyo was born in Havana, Cuba, on December 21, 1920.
Alicia Alonso was born Alicia Ernestina de la Caridad del Cobre Martínez Hoyo on December 21, 1920, in Havana, Cuba, the youngest of four children in a military family. Her father, a colonel in the Cuban army, and her mother raised her in a household that, while not artistic by trade, encouraged her early fascination with dance after she witnessed a children's ballet performance at around age nine.
This early exposure ignited a lifelong devotion to ballet, an art form with little institutional infrastructure in Cuba at the time. Alonso began formal training at Havana's Pro-Arte Musical society, one of the few venues offering serious ballet instruction on the island during the 1930s.
Her birth in a country without an established classical ballet tradition makes her subsequent rise to international prima ballerina status and her founding of a world-renowned national ballet company all the more historically remarkable. She would go on to become one of the most influential dancers of the twentieth century and a symbol of Cuban cultural achievement on the world stage.